State of the EHS Nation: Exclusive results from ISHN’s 28^th annual White Paper Reader Survey

While U.S. companies contend with a shortage of EHS professionals and skilled laborers, a global look at current and expected hiring reveals a complex picture. According to ManpowerGroup's first-quarter 2013 Manpower Employment Outlook Survey, the majority of employers in the global labor market are less confident about adding staff than they were at the start of 2012, suggesting a more difficult time ahead for job seekers in some countries.

Young women and girls in Kazakhstan share their stories of trafficking, exploitation and violence and how connection and compassion is helping them to raise their voices and show leadership.

Vanessa Phung is a seasoned expert in Talent Development and Human Resources as the Founder and CEO of People Haven.

Commercial drivers in Orange County who are in need of expert legal representation should contact Mr. Ticket.

TyreGo.ie is now offering excellent value with their new Tyre Changer & Wheel Balancer packages.

Mobile Auto Glass Inc. provides repair and replacement services for various kinds of vehicles in Los Angeles County.

Express Oil Change & Service Center is concerned that Brian McCann's performance in the 2012 season will result in his contract not being extended with the Atlanta Braves.

For newly added discount Fisher and Meyer snow plow parts - in stock - visit www.PartsforSnowPlows.com. Lowest prices - fastest shipping!

Car Accident lawyer Anthony Carbone is proud to announce the launch of a new website to guide victims of car accident injuries

Across the US, a significant portion of drivers do not have insurance or have limited insurance coverage.

TyreGo.ie has recently launched its first batch of Easy Balance Balancing Compound to the website.

Mr. Ticket, traffic ticket lawyer in Los Angeles, offers free consultation to drivers who have been charged with a traffic violation.

Sponsored by the Mothers Against Drunk Drivers nonprofit organization and billed as the "Mother of all Walks," the event will be held at the Phoenix Zoo, 455 North Galvin Parkway, Phoenix, Arizona 85008.

Ronald A. Schneider lends years of expertise to his work with V2X

Fang Zhang is an accounting expert in auditing within the health care, state and local government and not-for-profit industries

Mountainside, a leading holistic addiction treatment center in the Northeast, is in-network with Optum, expanding treatment access to a wider range of people in need.

The Complaint alleges that despite performing non-exempt work, TikTok improperly classified its Inside Sales Representatives as exempt and required them to work overtime to meet TikTok's productivity standards/metrics.

Hartwig Mechanical service extends to Northern Illinois, the North Side of Chicago and Southern Wisconsin.

Close to 4,000 SF of elegance and ambiance in one of the State's wealthiest zip codes and minutes to downtown Portland

- Overseas Korean Unification Event held successfully in Leipzig, Germany on November 9 - North Korean defector's live painting and barbed wire bracelets highlighting reality attracts attention

A Global Art Exhibition Examining Humanity's Journey Through Identity, Technology and Culture

J. Martinez & Company offers an explanation of the differences between Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee and High Mountain.

Kunkel is the president of Wordslinger Marketing & PR, primarily serving the nonprofit community

ICE cotton futures saw a slight rebound after recent lows, capped by a stronger dollar. Traders have shifted focus to the March 2025 contract, with trading volume remaining high. Crude oil's recovery offset earlier price declines, easing polyester costs. Other agricultural commodities showed mixed trends. Traders await the USDA export sales report, with attention on Chinese demand.

Lululemon and Disney have launched a 34-piece limited-edition collection blending Disney nostalgia with Lululemon's performance and casual styles. The 'Happily Ever Active' campaign celebrates movement with ambassadors like NBA's Jordan Clarkson and Olympian Colleen Quigley. The collection is available online and in stores worldwide, featuring items like Align Tights and the Define Jacket.

China’s latest fiscal announcements seem aimed at addressing medium-term structural impediments to economic growth from strained local government finances, but are unlikely to immediately boost or offset deflationary risk, Fitch Ratings said. It expects a budget deficit of 7.1 per cent of GDP this year. It believes fiscal stimulus will remain incremental and responsive to downside risks.

Burberry has introduced its first virtual scarf try-on experience in its ‘Wrapped in Burberry’ holiday campaign. Partnering with AR provider WANNA, the immersive experience lets customers view iconic Burberry scarves in real-time, with over 50 styles and two classic options. Available online and in select stores, customers can share images and directly access product pages for purchases.

Epic Group has restructured its leadership team, appointing Sunil Daryanani and Dinesh Virwani as executive vice chairmen, and Suraj Kalra as CEO to drive its strategic objectives. Led by founder Ranjan Mahtani, the committee also includes leaders in finance, HR, procurement, and digitalisation, aiming to strengthen Epic’s global presence, improve operations, and enhance stakeholder value.

While interactive voice response systems (IVRs) have been invaluable in reducing contact center costs, we need to be honest: not many are delivering experiences that meet consumer expectations. It's no surprise given the rise of digital channels.

Unstructured data, which comprises almost 80% of any enterprise's data, holds untapped value when it comes to addressing challenges and embracing opportunities.

For decades, organizations have tried to unlock the collective knowledge contained within their people and systems. And the challenge is getting harder, since every year, massive amounts of additional information are created for people to share. We've reached a point at which individuals are unable consume, understand, or even find half the information that is available to them.

The Missouri Court of Appeals upheld a determination that a worker was not entitled to underinsured motorist benefits for an on-the-job injury caused by an inattentive driver. Case: Preston v. Progressive…

Mini tripods have become increasingly popular over the last few years. They’ve become a versatile and invaluable part of many creators’ kit bags. There are...

The post The Mambapod is a compact tripod you can mount anywhere appeared first on DIY Photography.

Yesterday, Cameron Koczon shared a link to the dingbat font, Pictos, by the talented, Drew Wilson. Cameron predicted that dingbats will soon be everywhere. Symbol fonts, yes, I thought. Dingbats? No, thanks. Jason Santa Maria replied:

@FictiveCameron I hope not, dingbat fonts sort of spit in the face of accessibility and semantics at the moment. We need better options.

Jason rightly pointed out the accessibility and semantic problems with dingbats. By mapping icons to letters or numbers in the character map, they are represented on the page by that icon. That’s what Pictos does. For example, by typing an ‘a’ on your keyboard, and setting Pictos as the font-face for that letter, the Pictos anchor icon is displayed.

Other folks suggested SVG and JS might be better, and other more novel workarounds to hide content from assistive technology like screen readers. All interesting, but either not workable in my view, or just a bit awkward.

Falling down with CSS text-replacement

A CSS solution in an article from Pictos creator, Drew Wilson, relies on the fact that most of his icons are mapped to a character that forms part of the common name for that symbol. The article uses the delete icon as an example which is mapped to ‘d’. Using :before and :after pseudo-elements, Drew suggests you can kind-of wrangle the markup into something sort-of semantic. However, it starts to fall down fast. For example, a check mark (tick) is mapped to ‘3’. There’s nothing semantic about that. Clever replacement techniques just hide the evidence. It’s a hack. There’s nothing wrong with a hack here and there (as box model veterans well know) but the ends have to justify the means. The end of this story is not good as a VoiceOver test by Scott at Filament Group shows. In fairness to Drew Wilson, though, he goes on to say if in doubt, do it the old way, using his font to create a background image and deploy with a negative text-indent.

I agreed with Jason, and mentioned a half-formed idea:

@jasonsantamaria that’s exactly what I was thinking. Proper unicode mapping if possible, perhaps?

The conversation continued, and thanks to Jason, helped me refine the idea into this post.

Jon Hicks flagged a common problem for some Windows users where certain Unicode characters are displayed as ‘missing character’ glyphs depending on what character it is. I think most of the problems with dingbats or missing Unicode characters can be solved with web fonts and Unicode.

Rising with Unicode and web fonts

I’d love to be able to use custom icons via optimised web fonts. I want to do so accessibly and semantically, and have optimised font files. This is how it could be done:

1. Map the icons in the font to the existing Unicode code points for those symbols wherever possible.

   Unicode code points already exist for many common symbols. Fonts could be tiny, fast, stand-alone symbol fonts. Existing typefaces could also be extended to contain symbols that match the style of individual widths, variants, slopes, and weights. Imagine a set of Clarendon or Gotham symbols for a moment. Wouldn’t that be a joy to behold?

   There may be a possibility that private code points could be used if a code-point does not exist for a symbol we need. Type designers, iconographers, and foundries might agree a common set of extended symbols. Alternatively, they could be proposed for inclusion in Unicode.

2. Include the font with font-face.

   This assumes ubiquitous support (as any use of dingbats does) — we’re very nearly there. WOFF is coming to Safari and with a bit more campaigning we may even see WOFF on iPad soon.

3. In HTML, reference the Unicode code points in UTF-8 using numeric character references.

   Unicode characters have corresponding numerical references. Named entities may not be rendered by XML parsers. Sean Coates reminded me that in many Cocoa apps in OS X the character map is accessible via a simple CMD+ALT+t shortcut. Ralf Herrmann mentioned that unicode characters ‘…have “speaking” descriptions (like Leftwards Arrow) and fall back nicely to system fonts.’

Limitations

1. Accessibility: Limited Unicode / entity support in assistive devices.

   My friend and colleague, Jon Gibbins’s old tests in JAWS 7 show some of the inconsistencies. It seems some characters are read out, some ignored completely, and some read as a question mark. Not great, but perhaps Jon will post more about this in the future.

   Elizabeth Pyatt at Penn State university did some dingbat tests in screen readers. For real Unicode symbols, there are pronunciation files that increase the character repertoire of screen readers, like this file for phonetic characters. Symbols would benefit from one.

2. Web fonts: font-face not supported.

   If font-face is not supported on certain devices like mobile phones, falling back to system fonts is problematic. Unicode symbols may not be present in any system fonts. If they are, for many designers, they will almost certainly be stylistically suboptimal. It is possible to detect font-face using the Paul Irish technique. Perhaps there could be a way to swap Unicode for images if font-face is not present.

Now, next, and a caveat

I can’t recommend using dingbats like Pictos, but the icons sure are useful as images. Beautifully crafted icon sets as carefully crafted fonts could be very useful for rapidly creating image icons for different resolution devices like the iPhone 4, and iPad.

Perhaps we could try and formulate a standard set of commonly used icons using the Unicode symbols range as a starting point. I’ve struggled to find a better visual list of the existing symbols than this Unicode symbol chart from Johannes Knabe.

Icons in fonts as Unicode symbols needs further testing in assistive devices and using font-face.

Last, but not least, I feel a bit cheeky making these suggestions. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Combine it with a bit of imagination, and it can be lethal. I have a limited knowledge about how fonts are created, and about Unicode. The real work would be done by others with deeper knowledge than I. I’d be fascinated to hear from Unicode, accessibility, or font experts to see if this is possible. I hope so. It feels to me like a much more elegant and sustainable solution for scalable icons than dingbat fonts.

For more on Unicode, read this long, but excellent, article recommended by my colleague, Andrei, the architect of Unicode and internationalization support in PHP 6: The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets.

This might as well be a Herschel ad. ???? (at London, United Kingdom)

Rob Ball
Untitled, Margate, England, 2014
From the Dreamland series
Website - RobBall.co.uk

Rob Ball is a British photographer and academic working on self-initiated projects and commissions. His work has been shown at numerous institutions and festivals including The National Portrait Gallery, Ways of Looking Festival, Format Festival and Bonnington Gallery, Nottingham. Interested in areas including materiality, process, landscape and the archive, Rob produces a variety of outputs including the publications Unremarkable Stories and Beyond the View (2014). Rob is Deputy Director of The South East Archive of Seaside Photography (SEAS).

““I always hated that word—marketing—and I hate it now. Because for me, and this may sound simplistic, the key to marketing is to make something people want. When they want it, they buy it. When they buy it, you have sales. So the product has to speak. The product is what markets things.””

- Interview with Tom Ford.

The county said the 32-hour workweek has attracted a host of new talent: Applications have spiked 85.5% and open positions are being filled 23.75% faster, while more employees are staying in their jobs -- separation (employees quitting or retiring) dropped by 48%. And 84% of employees said their work-life balance was better.

Richard Dunning is on the Middleware Assisted Take-Up Service Team at Eduserv. Richard facilitated a workshop session on "Athens, Shibboleth, the UK Access Management Federation, OpenID, CardSpace and all that - single sign-on for your Web site" with Andrew Cormack and Andy Powell.

The "Call for speakers and workshop facilitators" page has been created. [21 Jan 2008]

The University of Aberdeen Sport and Recreation department are able to offer all delegates preferential rates for using the Sports facilities for the duration of the conference. [11 July 2008]

Duncan Ireland has been in the Internet Officer role at the University of Strathclyde since late 2002. His time is largely taken up with rolling out the T4 Sitemanager CMS (see http://www.strath.ac.uk/terminalfour/). Before arriving in academia, Duncan could be found at Scottish Amicable (latterly Prudential) where he worked on a project to implement the MediaSurface CMS. Prior to that he worked for BAE Systems where he saw the introduction of standard desktops, internet access and an Intranet. His leisure time is largely spent learning how to duck(!) while training with Caledonian Muay Thai in Glasgow (see http://www.caledonianmuaythai.co.uk/) - he refutes any suggestion that this training was deliberately undertaken to bring more folk round to his way of thinking in meetings. Duncan took part a panel session on "Whose Web Is It Anyway?" with Andrew Cox and Brian Kelly. Duncan can be contacted at Duncan.Ireland AT strath.ac.uk

The Revd Gareth Saunders interests lie primarily in information architecture, XHTML, CSS, accessibility, usability and helping to make sure that people can find the information they are looking for. Gareth studied Divinity (Practical Theology and Christian Ethics) at St Mary's College, University of St Andrews; he then had jobs in a Borders textile mill and with homeless young people in London before returning to Scotland to complete a Masters at New College, University of Edinburgh and work as a Scottish Episcopalian priest in Inverness and Edinburgh. In 2006 Gareth made the seamless transition from full-time parish ministry to focus on the Web and Information Architecture: having pastoral care for Web users, if you like. He is a member of the Information Architecture Institute and is a regular blogger. Gareth facilitated a workshop on "Mind Mapping for Effective Content Management" with Stephen Evans.

Arthur Clune works at the University of York as an IT Security Specialist, but is also a member of the UK Honeynet Project. In the latter role he is involved in developing the Honeynet Project's "Honeymine" data analysis tool and in helping with other aspects of Honeynet development. In the past he has worked on simulations of Internet traffic, studies of road traffic and in pure mathematics. Arthur give a plenary talk on "Trends in Web Attacks".